Month: May 2013

Liberal retreat


by digby

There’s a lot of talk about MSNBC ratings being down accompanied by the usual gleeful triumphalism over on the right.  I don’t pretend to fully understand the reason for this, but I must point out that it’s not just MSNBC.  The online left has seen a steep decline in traffic since the election as well, which indicates to me that our audience in general is simply not interested in following politics at the moment. As Alex Pareene points out in this piece, politics is MSNBC’s bread and butter.

It’s simplistic to say that viewers aren’t watching because the president’s having a bad news cycle. Bad news is often good for ratings. Liberals like to watch Republicans portrayed as big scary meanies when they’re not watching them be presented as inept nutso clowns. There was no such thing as liberal cable news during the Clinton impeachment, but if there had been I guarantee it would’ve been a hit. Maybe — maybe! — some viewers are tuning out because they’re not hearing enough of an unqualified defense of the president and his administration from some of MSNBC’s more left-leaning voices. But I’d guess that’s still not enough people to make a huge ratings difference. 

Perhaps there just isn’t a huge, permanent, year-round liberal audience for political news and discussion. Which is effectively all MSNBC does, because political discussion is cheap as hell, and gets good ratings when certain periods and certain personalities align. 

I don’t think that’s it. People aren’t taking the scandals all that seriously (so far.)  And I’m with pareene that if the Republicans really get crazy, the audience will come back. Short of that (or something else catastrophic) my impression is that liberals are either bored or disillusioned right now for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that a liberal majority has been effectively obstructed and the president seems to be ineffectual.  (I realize that political scientists tell us that the presidency isn’t very powerful, but most people don’t believe that since we’ve extolled the office as the most powerful on earth for decades.)

We’ve been through a number of elections, crises, other ups and downs over the past decade but I’ve not seen anything like the drop in interest over the past few months.  If it was just me I’d attribute it to my little project having run its course but it’s happening across the liberal media spectrum. I don’t now what the answer is, but it isn’t that there isn’t a permanent audience. There was until very recently.  It’s that the liberal audience is tuning out and one can only  assume it’s because they don’t like what they see in our politics.

It makes me a little bit more concerned for 2014/2016 than I otherwise would be.

Meanwhile, everyone should be sure to watch MSNBC, particularly Chris Hayes, who is doing fascinating work you should see.  You’ll feel a little bit less disillusioned if you do:

Bye bye Bachmann

by David Atkins

Michele Bachmann is leaving Congress in order to avoid her upcoming re-election campaign defeat in order to concentrate on defending herself regarding fraud charges from her presidential campaign in order to spend more time with her family, apparently in order to spend even more time defending a word salad of conservative principles.

Normally one would be inclined to blow Bachmann off as a joke, a fortunate passing virus of outrageousness that has fortunately run its course.

But that isn’t the case. The Republican Party has been overtaken by an army of Bachmann clones just as crazy as she is.

Nor will Bachmann likely disappear from the public stage. She’ll simply pull off the Sarah Palin grift, moving effortlessly from elected office to some wingnut welfare sinecure on Fox News, The Blaze or elsewhere. That’s the modern conservative movement in a nutshell: the Elmer Gantrys, the corporations that fund them, and the rabid aging flock of white wool sheep who follow them in the hope of repealing the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution and empathy in general. It little matters if the hucksters walk the halls of Congress, the conservative media, or the boardroom. It’s all for one and one for all.

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Hypocrisy to the 10th Power

by digby

Wait, what?

Republican senators are fuming about President Barack Obama’s attempt to fill empty seats on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, charging him with “court-packing” and alleging that his push to confirm nominees is all politics.

But not only is Obama not “court-packing” — a term describing an attempt to add judges to a court with the goal of shifting the balance, not filling existing vacancies — but Republicans’ efforts to prevent Obama from appointing judges amount to their own attempt to tip the scales in their favor. What’s more, some of the GOP senators trying to prevent his nominees from advancing previously voted to fill the court when there was a Republican in the White House.

As it stands, the powerful D.C. Circuit has 11 seats, three of which are vacant. Obama has signaled plans to put forward nominees for all three open slots as soon as this week. But Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and other Republicans are pushing legislation that would eliminate those seats and keep the court where it is: with eight judges, four of whom were appointed by Democrats and four of whom were appointed by Republicans.

I often say that Republicans have retired the concept of hypocrisy and people titter politely, but I suspect they think it’s a sort of glib slogan and not a serious observation. But I mean it literally. It goes far beyond double standards or duplicity or bad faith. There’s an aggression to it, a boldness, that dares people to bring up the bald and obvious fact that the person making the charge is herself a far worse perpetrator of the thing she is decrying. There’s an intellectual violence in it.

In a world in which the conservatives weren’t such post modern shape shifters, we could come to a consensus on certain issues in this country — like privacy, for instance. We could agree that it’s wrong for government employees to use private information for partisan purposes — or for the media, including bloggers, to stalk and publish private information of anyone who dares speak out for a political cause. But we don’t live in a world like that.

We live in a world where the right wing ruthlessly and without mercy degrades and attacks by any means necessary what they perceive as the enemy, and then uses the great principles of democracy and fair play when the same is done to them. They leave the rest of us standing on the sidelines looking like fools for ever caring about anything but winning.

It’s not that I believe liberals are purely good and decent. We have many, many faults and are almost preternaturally talented at seizing defeat from the jaws of victory before we even get finished celebrating. But failing to truly grok just how pernicious this right wing rejection of hypocrisy really is and how much power it gives them is a foolish mistake.

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Lesson for the day

by digby

Markets good? Not necessarily:

Most of us would agree that harming others on purpose and for no reason is immoral. Social scientists have long assumed that marketplaces are to blame for many a compromised moral. There’s no shortage of historical examples: take the slave trade, or buying indulgences from the church, for instance. Now science has weighed in to confirm this hunch: a marketplace degrades a person’s morals.

That was what German researchers found in an experimental set-up that put people’s morals up against money in a market.

The researchers split participants into three different groups that represented different market-type situations. In the first group, participants were presented with two options: A) receive 10 euros (about $13) for accepting the death of a lab mouse, or B) forgo the money and save the mouse’s life. (The mice in question were young and healthy but had failed to exhibit certain genetic traits, so they were no longer of use to the lab.)

Before making the decision, participants were shown a picture of a mouse and a video of the euthanizing process that would be used to kill the mouse. Of the 124 participants in this group, 46 percent said they would accept the mouse’s death in exchange for €10 or less.

A second group of 72 people participated in a bilateral market scenario, where one buyer and one seller interacted directly. The seller was given a mouse and told “the life of the mouse is entrusted to your care,” but he could sell it to the buyer, in which case the mouse would be killed. The buyer and seller could settle on a price of up to €20; the buyer got to keep the difference.

If they decided not to trade, neither person got any money and the mouse was allowed to live. In this second set-up, 72 percent of the sellers were willing to sacrifice the mouse for the money.

The third group was a multilateral market—seven buyers and nine sellers that could trade amongst themselves. As with the two-way market, 76 percent of sellers in this third group chose to accept the money (a mere €10 or less) despite the inevitable death of the mouse that would result.

Thus in a marketplace people on average valued the mouse’s life less than they did when individually asked. This is evidence, say the researchers, that market interaction lowers moral values as compared to individual actions.

This was confirmed when the experiments were run again but with coupons instead of mice (the side effect being losing the coupon instead of killing the mouse). With a non-living subject, market sellers gave up the coupons about as often as participants acting individually, indicating that the marketplace effects moral values but not neutral decisions. The results were published in Science last week.

The researchers have a few ideas about why markets may have such a negative effect on morality. In markets, since multiple people are interacting, the responsibility (and the resulting guilt) are shared and therefore lessened. The death is not wholly on any one person’s conscience. Markets are also a social endeavor, so social norms play a key role. Participants’ decisions may be swayed by how other participants act when determining what is appropriate. The third reason is simple distraction. When you’re so focused on the nitty gritty negotiation, you may not have the bandwidth to think about the moral implications of your decisions.

Whatever the reason, the researchers say the outcome is clear: markets make us more willing to fudge on our moral values.

Vulture capital versus the people of Argentina

by David Atkins

The vultures are circling over Argentina, and a major court case may determine the balance of power between nations of the world and the global parasitic tax-dodging financial sector that leeches off the world’s productivity.

Argentina did the right thing in 2002 by defaulting on exorbitant debts accrued through predatory disaster capitalism. Most of that debt has been restructured, but a few vulture capital firms decided to buy up part of the debt and demand full repayment. The question is now before the courts:

That question now faces the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, which has become an unlikely referee in a high-stakes grudge match pitting Wall Street investors against Argentina.

At its heart, the case tests the power of U.S. courts to force other countries to honor their debts. The outcome could hinder the ability of other struggling nations — including Greece and Cyprus — to renegotiate their commitments, potentially saddling them with crushing obligations they can’t escape.

In the button-down world of international finance, the proceedings have been nothing short of a barnburner. Each side has hired celebrity lawyers, traded insults and engaged in some bare-knuckle tactics, including the attempted seizure of an Argentine naval frigate by bondholders.

Now years of squabbling may be reaching a boiling point: A crucial ruling is expected as early as this week.

“The implications are huge,” economist and Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz said. “This court is balancing the interests of very small groups of creditors against those of entire countries.”

If the court rules against Argentina as it appears set to do, it will mean the total power of vulture capital over countries attempting to grow their economies in spite of exorbitant IMF demands and economic sabotage. It will constitute nothing less than a middle finger in the air of the world community by the pluocratic class, and a dare for the world to do something about it.

Perhaps the world should take them up on the dare.

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QOTD: Congressional ineptitude

by digby

Journalist Robert Kaiser talks about his experience covering the financial reform package and makes an important observation:

“…It was upsetting to me as a citizen to realize how few members understood the issues they were dealing with,” Kaiser remarked. “These are, of course, extremely complicated financial matters, how banks work, how they’re regulated, so on.”

“Not everybody can know this, but at the end, I concluded that you could fit the number of experts in Congress on financial issues easily onto the roster of a Major League Baseball team,” he added. “That’s 25 people. I think that is the max.”

Perhaps this is part of the problem?

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Deficit Hawks Down

by digby

My favorite story of the day

Senate Republicans who shared laughs with President Obama over dinner at the Jefferson Hotel in March are grumbling there has since been little follow-through from him on deficit talks.

They say the White House has not set up a process for negotiating controversial reforms to Social Security, healthcare programs and the tax code, and that absence of basic organization has stalled negotiations.

“We’ve made no progress. None,” said a GOP senator who had dinner with President Obama earlier this year. “There’s no process in place. Right now we just have 20 Republican senators meeting and talking to themselves.”

The lawmaker said Obama needs to sit down regularly with about five or six GOP senators to begin making substantial progress toward a deficit-reduction deal.

A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Some Republicans think the president has become distracted from the deficit by intensified public controversies over the attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of Tea Party groups and the Justice Department’s investigation of the Associated Press.

“Those kinds of things can’t help but turn the total focus of the deficit reduction away from the White House’s perspective,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), who had dinner with Obama on March 6 and golfed with him earlier this month.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who helped organize the March 6 dinner at the Jefferson Hotel, said that the White House and GOP senators have not gotten to the point of exchanging paper outlining their competing proposals. 

“We’ve been talking about trying to define the problem. Can we all agree what the next 30 years holds in terms of deficits, cost of entitlement programs? How much we’re going to spend, how much revenue we can generate?” Graham added. “It’s nice if you can have a 30-year view of things.” 

That is nice. And if they can all see 30 years into the future I hope they’ll share because it’s probably a good time to buy some stock.

Clearly, they have lost their focus. It wasn’t long ago that we were obsessed with the imminent collapse of Western civilization if we didn’t cut government spending to the bone immediately. Now, they can’t even define the problem and are looking for a “nice” 30 year projection. (Why 30, though? Why not take a 60 year view or a 100 year view — it’s just as useful…)

Unfortunately, the wind has gone out of the deficit fetishists sails:

Coburn agrees with colleagues who say there has been very little progress on deficit-reduction talks with Obama.

“I’d say that’s a fair assessment,” he said.

Obama told Republicans who had dinner with him on March 6 that a deficit deal would need to happen by August.

That timeline has now been pushed until the fall and may even slide to the end of the year.
“Maybe in January,” said Coburn.

Treasury Secretary Jack Lew took some of the pressure off earlier this month by alerting Congress that the nation’s debt ceiling would not have to be raised until after Labor Day.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates the debt ceiling does not have to be lifted until October or November.

Democrats say one problem is that Obama has had difficulty finding Republicans with the authority to negotiate on behalf of their party.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Republican Whip John Cornyn (Texas) face reelection in 2014. Although a credible conservative challenger has yet to emerge against either one, they remain cautious.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) declared at the beginning of the year that he was finished with negotiating one-on-one with Obama.

White House officials say the president made a good-faith offer toward compromise when he proposed adopting the chained consumer price index to curb the growth of Social Security benefits in his budget plan.

Hopes for a broad bipartisan deal to cut the deficit are waning.

Once again, saved by the GOP’s idiotic inability to take yes for an answer. Huzzah.

I’m not sure we’re out of the woods entirely, but it’s looking much less likely. Still, vigilance is necessary. The Pete Petersons of the world will not rest. When you have as much money as they do you can play a very long game.

Constraints for thee but not for me

by digby

Everything fits into place when you realize Obama does not believe he has abused any counterterrorism authorities. nytimes.com/2013/05/28/us/…
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) May 28, 2013

For nearly four years, the president had waged a relentless war from the skies against Al Qaeda and its allies, and he trusted that he had found what he considered a reasonable balance even if his critics did not see it that way. But now, he told his aides, he wanted to institutionalize what in effect had been an ad hoc war, effectively shaping the parameters for years to come “whether he was re-elected or somebody else became president,” as one aide said…

While part of the re-evaluation was aimed at the next president, it was also about Mr. Obama’s own legacy. What became an exercise lasting months, aides said, forced him to confront his deep conflicts as commander in chief: the Nobel Peace Prize winner with a “kill list,” the antiwar candidate turned war president, the avowed champion of transparency ordering operations over secret battlegrounds. He wanted to be known for healing the rift with the Muslim world, not raining down death from above.

Over the past year, aides said, Mr. Obama spent more time on the subject than on any other national security issue, including the civil war in Syria. The speech he would eventually deliver at the National Defense University became what one aide called “a window into the presidential mind” as Mr. Obama essentially thought out loud about the trade-offs he sees in confronting national security threats.

“Americans are deeply ambivalent about war,” the president said in his speech, and he seemed to be talking about himself as well. Mr. Obama said the seeming precision and remote nature of modern warfare can “lead a president and his team to view drone strikes as a cure-all for terrorism,” and it was not hard to imagine which president he had in mind.

“We must define the nature and scope of this struggle,” Mr. Obama said, “or else it will define us.”

In a sense, that had already happened to Mr. Obama. Somehow he had gone from the candidate who criticized what he saw as President George W. Bush’s excesses to the president who expanded the drone program his predecessor had left him. The killing he authorized in September 2011 of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen tied to terrorist attacks, brought home the disparity between how he had envisioned his presidency and what it had become. Suddenly, a liberal Democratic president was being criticized by his own political base for waging what some called an illegal war and asserting unchecked power.

“Somehow” he had gone from a candidate who criticized Bush’s excesses to the president who expanded the drone program? I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen by accident.  The problem, according to this article, is not that he believes he went too far or that it was a mistake, but rather that people will not remember him kindly for it. I think if he believes a change in direction at this late date can change his legacy on this, he’s being naive.

When JFK came into office and signed off on the Bay of Pigs debacle, he re-evaluated the policy immediately and became skeptical of his advisers and the military. There is some evidence that this skepticism was leading him to a withdrawal in Vietnam and there’s no doubt that it informed his decisions on the most important national security challenge of the nuclear age, the Cuban missile crisis. I don’t get the sense from this article, or anywhere else, that this is what’s at work with the Obama administration’s re-evaluation. It’s certainly possible that it is — we don’t know the whole story so perhaps the “leakers” of his thinking on the matter are not at liberty to share what he truly believes. But nothing in this article indicates that the president or his advisers have the least bit of regret for having taken this course.

As Spencer Ackerman writes above, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong. But it’s interesting that he does wish to constrain future presidents from doing as he has done. But we all know that’s not how it works.  Just as he took the powers that George Bush had seized and ran with them, so too will his successors. Whatever constraints he now proposes may recapture his image as a peacemaker but he cannot change the history he’s already made.

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Peace in our time: the get-off-my-lawn strategy

Peace in our time: the get-off-my-lawn strategy

We can all relax now;

Republican Sen. John McCain has quietly slipped into Syria for a meeting with Syrian rebels.

Spokeswoman Rachael Dean confirms the Arizona Republican made the visit. She declined further comment about the trip.

The visit took place amid meetings in Paris involving efforts to secure participation of Syria’s fractured opposition in an international peace conference in Geneva.

Two years of violence in Syria has killed more than 70,000 people. President Barack Obama has demanded that Syrian President Bashar Assad leave power, while Russia has stood by Syria, its closest ally in the Arab world.

McCain has been a leading proponent of arming the rebels and other aggressive military steps against the Assad regime. He has criticized Obama administration policy there while stopping short of backing U.S. ground troops in Syria.

Yes, John McCain knows exactly what to do:

For all the national attention surrounding John McCain’s two highly anticipated, protest-ridden commencement speeches in New York last week, the Senator actually saved some of his best material for the crowd that gathered on Friday behind closed doors in the back of the Regency Hotel.

In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city’s wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point.

“One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, ‘Stop the bullshit,'” said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

I’m sure he’ll be able to fix this on up just as easily.

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Stiglitz calls for an international tax avoidance regulatory system

by David Atkins

Continuing on a quietly growing theme, Joseph Stiglitz makes a clarion call for international regulations to bring multinational corporate tax dodgers to heel. The whole thing is superb, such that it pains me to excise any portion of it for fair use. Here’s a taste, but do read the whole thing:

Apple, like Google, has benefited enormously from what the US and other western governments provide: highly educated workers trained in universities that are supported both directly by government and indirectly (through generous charitable deductions). The basic research on which their products rest was paid for by taxpayer-supported developments – the internet, without which they couldn’t exist. Their prosperity depends in part on our legal system – including strong enforcement of intellectual property rights; they asked (and got) government to force countries around the world to adopt our standards, in some cases, at great costs to the lives and development of those in emerging markets and developing countries. Yes, they brought genius and organisational skills, for which they justly receive kudos. But while Newton was at least modest enough to note that he stood on the shoulders of giants, these titans of industry have no compunction about being free riders, taking generously from the benefits afforded by our system, but not willing to contribute commensurately. Without public support, the wellspring from which future innovation and growth will come will dry up – not to say what will happen to our increasingly divided society…

It is time the international community faced the reality: we have an unmanageable, unfair, distortionary global tax regime. It is a tax system that is pivotal in creating the increasing inequality that marks most advanced countries today – with America standing out in the forefront and the UK not far behind. It is the starving of the public sector which has been pivotal in America no longer being the land of opportunity – with a child’s life prospects more dependent on the income and education of its parents than in other advanced countries.

Globalisation has made us increasingly interdependent. These international corporations are the big beneficiaries of globalisation – it is not, for instance, the average American worker and those in many other countries, who, partly under the pressure from globalisation, has seen his income fully adjusted for inflation, including the lowering of prices that globalisation has brought about, fall year after year, to the point where a fulltime male worker in the US has an income lower than four decades ago. Our multinationals have learned how to exploit globalisation in every sense of the term – including exploiting the tax loopholes that allow them to evade their global social responsibilities.

Stiglitz makes note of the same possible destination-based tax system I did before, but with the same caveat about potential damage to manufacturing nations. It would still be better than the current system.

More importantly, there is a serious need to economically punish those nations who would sink everyone to the bottom of the tax code rat race:

The problem of multinational corporate tax avoidance is deeper, and requires more profound reform, including dealing with tax havens that shelter money for tax-evaders and facilitate money-laundering. Google and Apple hire the most talented lawyers, who know how to avoid taxes staying within the law. But there should be no room in our system for countries that are complicitous in tax avoidance. Why should taxpayers in Germany help bail out citizens in a country whose business model was based on tax avoidance and a race to the bottom – and why should citizens in any country allow their companies to take advantage of these predatory countries?

Indeed. It’s long past time for international trade agreements to focus on corralling the worst practices of multinational corporations rather than enabling. Globalization has worked out quite well for the jet setting plutocratic class. But it can just as easily work against them as well, with nowhere on the planet left to escape. They would do well to remember that.

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